First steps towards freelance design

So…what’s the plan? You have got a plan don’t you? You need a plan.

You’ve graduated as a professional in the creative industries where a consistently volatile and rewarding career awaits you and I'm here to tell you there is not a lot of room for flakiness. To thrive you need a plan and a few strategies to ensure you are providing a decent service to your clients.

A good plan to become a freelance creative professional may be to work in full time employment and build up a freelance client base with the intention of eventually working for yourself. Another good plan may to seek sponsorship, seek grants, or take out a business loan to start your own business. Even if you are only doing a few love jobs every few months, your client will need an invoice which means you need some form of structure in place. Everyone’s situation is going to be a bit different but there is no doubt, becoming a freelance designer will involve hard work and some courageous decision-making.

The following list of practices is far from profound and will take some time to perfect (like years) but the content within shouldn’t be considered optional, it's the bare minimum of good practice and each item listed needs to work hand-in-hand with your creative prowess. So I’m talking about practical stuff like setting calendar events for project milestones and timely responses to client or supplier communication, no brainer right? Get some systems into place that will work for you, I guarantee the long term benefits will be worth it.

Communication

Whether you are working on a project for a new client or a logo for your cousin’s latest entrepreneurial enterprise, set out to develop and maintain a trusting working relationship by communicating clearly at every stage. This includes talking about the hard stuff like money, project timeframes, and giving your client some realistic expectations and then you need take them with you on the creative journey as well. You might choose to put this in the form of a contract prior to starting the project to reduce the potential for surprise later on.

A really good thing to remember is that your client wants to talk to you.

Call your client if you don’t understand something (even if you think you might sound stupid). This will initiate a few things, it will help develop a trusting relationship, it will help the client feel included in the outcome and will ensure you don’t miss something that could be vital to the success of the project. We have a plethora of communication methods available to us these days, consider the type of conversations appropriate for email, phone or when you need to communicate face to face (in person or via Skype). Believe it or not, each method can affect the intention and perception of the subject matter being communicated. I agree that’s a bit deep, but definitely worth thinking about. Here’s a couple of articles as a starting point if you want to look into it a bit more:

Why Communication Is Today's Most Important Skill

How Technology Has Changed Workplace Communication

To wrap up this point, when communicating your creative solutions give your client more than one creative option, this will keep the solution aligned to the brief and reduce the possibility of the project going out of control. Be very clear on each design decision you’ve made, relate those decisions back to the project's design brief and be prepared to talk each creative option through thoroughly.

Show up

After talking to other creative business owners, I’m getting a pretty distinct picture that simply by turning up when I say I’m going to puts me ahead of the game. I don’t get it. I confess I’m a freakishly punctual person but if you know you are unpredictable and tend to lose track of time (especially when you are inside the Photoshop time vortex) it is possible to train yourself to become reliable by simply setting an alarm into your choice of technological device. Even better if all your devices are linked to the cloud, you can be like me and have numerous devices buzzing in unison, not annoying at all.

Why the alarm overkill, you ask? We work in a field where time is the commodity of most value. Deadlines are tight and are precious not only to our clients but also to our suppliers (like the bloke who’s printing our work). A delayed meeting can delay a project and in the end it’s just not a good look.

This may be too much so hold judgment please but when I’m setting up a meeting with a client, I take that very same moment to set an alarm for one day before and two hours before the meeting. The very instant a meeting time is decided upon I know my brain won’t hold this information for longer than an hour, max. If I tell myself ‘I’ll write it down later’ I immediately get flashbacks of times I’ve forgotten really important stuff and my internal alarms go off. That’s just too many alarms.

Clarify the design brief

Set up a briefing form for projects that require creative thinking. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, have a look at mine here. Hopefully by now you know the relevant information you need to be able to solve a creative problem, such as the target audience and the single message you need the project to communicate. This kind of information is necessary, it can’t be guessed and requires some detail from your client, after all, they know their business better than you do. Want another nugget of gold? Run for the hills if you ever hear the words ‘there is no brief, you have total creative freedom’. I’m sorry to break it to you but there is no such thing, you will always need an identified problem to be able to produce a solution.

With all of that in mind, at some point you will be required to produce work that may not need a full design brief, for example the branding and creative strategy may already be determined. You will still need an outline of the project’s objectives and existing branding information supplied to you.

Once you’ve filled out the applicable information on the design brief, ensure the client sees it, agrees with it, and puts their mark on it so you have an agreed document you can both refer to at future stages of the project.

Know your tools

Aha, the subject that seems to divide design educators. My own take is that creative thinking skills and the practical skills associated with digital tools are required in equal proportions and if you confidently understand both you will remain employable. One feeds the other. By understanding digital tools (i.e. Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign) you can efficiently produce your visually creative opus and alternatively, creative thinking skills applied to even the smallest project can enhance it beyond expectations (which makes you look good).

Know your own strengths AND weaknesses and work on strategies to improve weaknesses so you can confidently plan and produce any project that comes your way.

Take time to understand things like the difference between RGB and CMYK colour modes, use paragraph styles in InDesign and please…please don’t ignore the pen tool. Know it and love it.

Dedicate time to admin

I’m planning on posting a little bit later about time and finance management for freelancers where I'll give you some cool tools that are easy to use but for now I want to talk about the ‘on the fly’ admin stuff. Things like file naming, folder structure, backing up, layer naming and version control. There’s nothing more embarrassing than losing hours of work because you’ve accidently deleted the latest version of a project because it was sitting on your desktop with a million other files and you decided in a moment of procrastination that you needed a tidy up. That excuse just won’t cut it.

To be even more specific about ‘on the fly’ admin, I am talking about saving the work you are working on right now with an appropriate filename, saving linked assets that you've just created inside the project folder and using and naming layers within your artwork files. This can seem tedious especially when you are cruising along the creative highway but you’re going to slow yourself down quickly if you don’t have time to stop for fuel. Think about that one for a minute.

So these are some pretty general things to think about before you launch yourself into freelance design and as I was contemplating this content today one thing hit me. I’ve titled this post ‘First Steps Towards Freelance Design’ but the techniques listed above apply to all designers in any type of work environment. Like I said…the bare minimum of good practice.

Illustration © Julia Nielson 2017. First published Jan 4, 2017